“They Shall Run and Not Be Weary”
Rev. Kathy Duhon
As I’m sure many of you know, experiments have been done on meditating and praying
people. They have been hooked up to
various monitors and probes; blood samples have been taken before and after
spiritual practice, and the results have all been fascinating. Yes, their brain pattern changes,
consistently, and their blood changes to include more chemicals associated with
physical and emotional healthiness.
Their blood pressure and body temperature changes, for the healthy good,
and some monks also engage in deliberately raising their body temperature. With biofeedback, a more scientifically
understood form of neural processing, people also can
change their blood pressure, body temperature, and perception of pain. A couple of decades ago, several doctors and
therapists working with cancer patients developed imaging techniques to control
pain and fight cancer, and a big Harvard study showed that the pain was
definitely controlled, although not necessarily the cancer.
Within ourselves
is more power than we usually acknowledge, or access. This power may be totally contained within
our biochemical selves, or it may be part of our larger interdependent Beingness within the universe, or it may be that we are
able to access a power outside ourselves, that some name God. Whatever the means, or process, or reality,
this amazing power beyond the ordinary has always been noticed by human beings,
been sought after, … and been elusive.
Today I am searching for some
understanding of this power in the Hebrew Scriptures, where a people very early
on pinpointed it as a Holy Oneness, that was wholly Other.
We heard Psalm 42 in our responsive
reading. This is the lament of a king or
other leader from the North. This
lamenter comes to the end of the year with mourning, and perhaps with sickness.
He is going on a pilgrimage to the sanctuary
at
From feeling cast down, by the end
of the psalm, hope is beginning to come, with strong images of roaring
waterfalls and billowing seas to quench his spiritual thirst. In a section of the psalm that our hymnal did
not include, he says of God, “at night his song is with me”. What a poetic way of expressing divine
affirmation – “at night his song is with me.”
The psalms are poetry and song and
prayer, altogether, and even the laments among them return to hope, to
thanksgiving for God, who is “my rock”, as Psalm 42 says. God is both strength and Love, whereas the
voice of the psalmist is often struggling with feelings of abandonment, pursuit
by enemies, inadequacy (“I am a worm” is one of my favorite lines), and
despair. We can identify with the
struggle and pain of the psalmists, but can we understand, as well, the hope
and strength that the psalmists say faith in God brings? The psalms are a great
poetic spiritual legacy that give people power and hope.
Another amazing source of spiritual
poetry in the Hebrew Scriptures comes from the prophets. We heard today from Isaiah, chapter 40, which
is the beginning of 16 chapters of some of the most beautiful poetry of hope
and renewal, about the longest stretch of something so lyrical and positive in
the Hebrew Scriptures, according to Biblical scholar Bill Holladay. We heard the beginning of chapter 40 two
weeks ago, a standard reading for the Christmas season: “Comfort, O Comfort my people” it begins.
This is also the beginning of what
is called Second Isaiah, for it is written by a different person than the
Isaiah who wrote chapters 1- 39. Second
Isaiah was an unnamed prophet who, around 540 B.C., wrote chapters 40 – 55,
(still others wrote the rest of Isaiah).
This is the time of the Babylonian Exile, and this prophet is preaching
hope and deliverance to the Jews in
All of Isaiah, though written by
many, over hundreds of years, has a fairly unified understanding of God. God is high, lifted up, and called “Holy One
of Israel”, a term rarely used in the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures.
The people that Isaiah is preaching
to are weary, faltering in faith, feeling weak and oppressed, and Second Isaiah
tells them that God is strong and cares for them, a Creator who is forever, and
will indeed help them. God gives power
to the faint, so much power that they will keep going and going, even when the
youth are exhausted. Many of us, having
just experienced family reunions, know how much energy young people have –
God’s power is even stronger.
Second Isaiah says that they who
wait for the Lord “will run and not be weary.”
What does it mean to wait for God?
That’s not a specific commandment about faith, but a call to the commitment
of faithfulness – it’s less about having the right beliefs than about being
open and available to the sacred, the Holy One.
This is spiritual poetry, not theology.
If you wait faithfully and openly, though you feel weak, doubtful, and
oppressed, a power will come to you that allows you to
run and not be weary.
A favorite line from this chapter in
Isaiah, which has made it into sacred song, is:
“they shall mount up with wings like eagles”. Those who wait for God will be lifted up on
eagle’s wings. This imagery sounds
strong, but also soaring, exciting and lifted up, like Isaiah’s images of God.
For the Jews in exile in
The last reading today is from the
First Book of Kings, and it is also about a wavering faith and the power of
God, but this is a little different.
It’s a narrative, a story, as well as spiritual poetry and prayer. Walter Brueggemann
commented about the Books of Kings, that these narratives haunt the community
of faith, giving folks courage to take up their transformation. He also noted that the Books of Kings cover
400 years of history and 20 kings, but 1/3 of these 2 books are about 3
prophets, which would be like 1/3 of American history being about Susan B.
Anthony, Eugene Victor Debs, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Elijah fears for his life and is
upset with the unfaithful people that he has been called to serve, and who have
turned on him. He seems to be rejecting
his calling as a prophet; he prays to die.
He flees to the southern desert, what some call a pilgrimage, to Horeb, also called
Yahweh asks, “what
are you doing here, Elijah?” In
other words, why aren’t you in
Elijah understands Yahweh to answer
by telling him to ‘stand before God’, in other words, to serve as a prophet
again. Then comes
the description of the traditional ways that God has appeared in the Hebrew
Scriptures – through big events like wind, earthquake, and fire. (I chose this scripture passage long before
the tsunami of this past week) Some
scholars feel this represents a turning point in the Bible from earlier
theology that tended to cast the Hebrew God as a bit of a storm god, more like
his Canaanite competition, Ba’al, whom Elijah rejects,
and so this passage may reject that kind of theophany.
I believe that disaster can also bring
folks to a stripped away place where they may know God, or the sacred, or the
Real, in a way that was not possible during ordinary, cluttered time. Or, disaster may fully strip away faith. Trying to find God’s power in wind,
earthquake and fire is not enough.
Rather, God is in “the still, small voice”, as it has been translated,
or perhaps a better translation: God is
in “the sound of sheer silence.”
Yet Elijah tattles on himself further
that he still was not convinced – some folks need more than one divine
revelation. After the silence, he still
feels the question, “What are you doing here?” and he still
complains. (And after all these years, this
is the example of how to communicate
with God that has been preserved for us, so none of us can feel all that bad if
our spiritual practice is not going as well as we’d like.)
Finally, Elijah figures out what it all
means for him. The message he
understands from God is that he’s supposed to go back and name his own
successor prophet – he doesn’t have to do it all by himself, he can eventually retire. (Probably, if he’d listened to any of his
friends and family, he’d have gotten that message a lot sooner.) He also received two other commissions that
don’t work out directly – anointing a couple of kings – but his successor, Elisha, does anoint them.
Elijah was in despair, bitter,
righteous, and doubting everything, including his own ability to go on living. Yet, he remained faithful – albeit
complainingly so – and tried to seek the way.
By the revelation of silence and questioning, he is given the courage
and hope to return to do what needs to be done, to do great things for his
people. Like Second Isaiah, and the
psalmist who wrote Psalm 42, Elijah comes to know the power and Love of God
very personally, not as remote glory, but as inner strength.
All of these characters from the
Hebrew Scriptures hold up to us truths we know very well – despair, doubt, self-righteousness,
questioning, weakness, exile, dryness of the soul. And this scriptural poetry and narrative also
encourages us to seek, to go on pilgrimage, to leave the ordinariness, to
listen to the silence, to wait, to be faithful.
In these passages, what happens between
the point of despair and weakness, and the place of hope and power, is not
entirely clear. In fact, it almost seems
a paradox, that the power does not come from our own efforts
or our trying to be strong, but is grounded in our acknowledged weakness, doubt and despair. What the Hebrew Scriptures do declare is that
God, Yahweh, the Holy One, the silence, the Creator, the Everlasting, the
spiritual waterfall, the deep, the eagles’ wings, the hope, the assurance, the
power, the Lord, is accessible, is real, is available for us and can become
part of us. We are lifted up, we have the power to do the great things that need
doing. It is not simple or clear or
easy, but the map is there in the poetry, the clues are found in the
narratives. The treasure is for us, for
all, for all time. Amen.